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Patience "Braith" Caleotti
Patience "Braith" Caleotti is a character on Plagued. She was created on August 12, 2013 by Skye. Personality Over her years in the aggressive and violent world she has grown up in, Braith has gone from a curious little kid to an intelligent, if snarky young woman. She is pigheaded and stubborn in her opinion. She has a very decided set of morals, and if she perceives something as “wrong”, it will be difficult to make her see otherwise. Having lived with a professional con for almost five years, Braith isn’t the most moralistic kid. She knows you have to do crappy things to survive, and so she helps Salvatore with his schemes willingly. She believes (an ideal passed on from him) that stupid people deserve to get swindled, though she is never unaware that what she is doing would probably horrify her dead mother. When she is around strangers, Braith is guarded, sharp and occasionally mean. She can be sweet if it suits her, as she often helps Sal out with duping people. She can spin sob stories about being abandoned by her father (which she doesn’t know is actually a truth that Sal has hidden from her) to get people to lower their guard around her. After all, she’s a harmless kid with a BB gun. How much damage could she do? She will sometimes lead hungry Overminds and humans into dark allies, before letting Sal step in. Turns out, quite a bit. Braith, for all her patient, sweet swindling of people, can be devious and brash, with wit to match her sharp tongue. She is not above turning her environment into a weapon, often using the jagged ends of broken bottles, rocks, metal pipes and anything else she can hold. She also has fairly good aim with a gun, having been practicing since she was seven years old under Sal’s tutelage. She has always been curious and rather adventurous. Telling her she can’t do something is a sure-fire way to make her do just that to prove everyone wrong. It often lands her in peril, and she relies heavily on her guardian to pull her out. Mischievous and wearing her rough-and-tough act like a shield, Braith gets into scrapes very frequently. But when she is alone, Braith, at her very core, is still a kid. She keeps her grief over her parents inside her, letting it fester unseen. She is ashamed to show weakness, and if she ever does cry, it will usually be alone. All she has known growing up is that weakness can mean death. Unlike most children, she hasn’t known affection since she last saw her mother about five years ago. She adores Sal, whom she has subbed in for her absent father, but she would never admit it. Occasionally, she baits his temper, calling him things like "aunt Sally" when he tries to act parental. She isn't touchy-feely by nature, though she tends to have her moments of wishing her mom were still alive. She also tends to panic slightly if Sal disappears for too long, as she is convinced long absences mean death. History Born a few miles from Fort York to a dysfunctional couple, Braith was trouble from the very beginning. Christened Patience Mary Braith Caleotti, she was quick to drop her first name as soon as she understood what it meant. Her father called her Patience, her mother picked Braith, and the hard-headed blonde preferred her mother to her father. “Precocious” was the word relatives used when they didn’t know how else to tell her parents their little girl was a brat. She had a very decided view of the world around her, and from a very young age, she was shrewd and observant. What she observed, she commented on. What she didn’t like, she pointed out. Her family life wasn’t the most stable. Though they were well off enough, it was emotional attachment they lacked. Braith’s earlier memories before the apocalypse are mainly of her parents fighting. Her father’s conscience was surpassed by his love of gambling and women, much to her mother’s dismay. He was flighty and unreliable, prone to passing off his responsibilities to his wife. Screaming matches were the signal that daddy was home. Whenever he was, he rarely had time for Braith, too inclined to pursue his own leisure. Over time, her parents grew increasingly distant with each other, and he began spending more and more time away. Braith was too young to understand that he was seeing someone else. Her mother wasn’t the epitome of maternal sainthood either. She had a history of personality disorders; she could be aggressive, impulsive and hostile sometimes. She was prone to being oversensitively emotional. Whenever Braith’s father vanished for long days on his “business trips”, Clarke would busy herself with her own flings to console her wounds, abandoning her daughter in favour of men and booze. Braith would spend the time learning to fend for herself, even teaching herself how to find food around the kitchen on her own. One time, she suffered a severe burn on her right arm when she microwaved and then spilled a bowl of soup as she tried to take it off the counter without gloves. Yet her mother wasn’t all bad. As she applied a cooling salve to Braith’s burnt skin, Clarke sang to the four-year-old to distract her. Whenever Clarke got herself together, she could be a cool mom. Braith’s early memories of learning to read, learning colours and the names of things, feature her mother. The woman was slightly whimsical, slightly scatter-brained and emotional, but she was usually there when Braith needed her to be. Though prone to anger, she could be endlessly patient with her daughter, and a kid like Braith came with a requirement for high tolerance. Weekly mishaps were common in their household. Braith was curious about everything around her, and from the moment she could walk on her own, she would be off wandering out the garden and down the street. She would escape out the doggy door before her mother figured it out and started latching it, much to the misery of their Golden Lab. Little Braith was the type of kid who would spot a rose bush across the street and wander over to pick flowers off it, heedless of traffic. Her mother once found her in the recycling bin, constructing unidentifiable shapes from newspaper, minutes before the garbage truck came down the street. Once when she was three, Braith dug through her father’s coat and located his pack of cigarettes and lighter. Blaine had modified it, removing the heavy spring to make it easier to ignite. He was rarely ever in the house at that point, and child safety had thus not been a primary concern. She nearly burned the whole house down when she managed to light and then drop it in fear – right on top of his coat. Blaine was not thrilled, and Clarke was even more furious at him than she had already been. It was his carelessness in every aspect of his life that drove her to her breaking point. She filed for divorce shortly before Braith’s fourth birthday. Her birthday gift that year was to be abandoned with the father who didn’t seem to want her. It wasn’t that Clarke didn’t want her. She fought for custody in court, but she wasn’t financially sound enough to raise a child on her own, and Blaine had listed the house under his aunt’s name, so Clarke came away with absolutely nothing from their marriage. Not only that, Blaine’s lawyers constructed a convincing case against Clarke’s alcohol abuse (which was partly true) and repressed mental disorders, which tended to lead her to phases of careless neglect of Braith. Whether or not Blaine actually wanted to keep his daughter was anyone’s guess, but it could have to do with the child tax Braith got every year or simply the fact that her father could not face losing his kid to his ex-wife in front of all his friends and relatives. He had a certain obsession with winning that even Braith picked up on. He was a devout gambler, he would cheat his way through anything he touched, and he never let her win the few times they played games together. After her mother left, Braith was distraught. She only ever got to see Clarke on a few weekends, and she and her father never grew very close. Most of her days were spent with a babysitter. She was undeniably relieved when she started preschool. She was gearing up for a long weekend with her mother when the reports of undead rising swept across town. Packing up whatever gear he could, Blaine took his daughter away from the city, heading toward the countryside. This plan backfired, because almost every other person in the country had had the same idea. They hid in abandoned houses and factories, changing locations as they doubled back toward the nearest city, making their way up the east coast. Braith’s fifth birthday came and went, unnoticed. She was often exhausted with all the travelling they did, and they had to make regular stops. Being as curious as she was, she would often ignore her father’s caution and try to sneak out to see the danger for herself. Blaine was not impressed. She also couldn’t run very fast, and her father had to carry her more often than not when the Lessers came. Being a kid, she was often hungry, and with their dwindling supplies, she grew skinnier and weaker. Perhaps Blaine grew tired of having to keep himself and a reliant child alive. One day, Blaine situated them in a warehouse in a highly infested, industrial area of Linden, New Jersey, miles from Fort York. Braith had come down sick, and her father told her to stay put – sternly — while he went to find water and supplies. She was too worn out to notice that he took every piece of his gear with him for this seemingly brief supply run. He left her with one emergency combat knife. He never came back. She waited all that day and into the night. At dawn, when she could hear the moan of Lessers from her spot up on the second floor loft, she wondered if her father was ever coming back. The person who climbed up onto that loft and found her was a different man. She had never seen him before, but he told her that her father had died. Five-year-old Braith, who by now had seen enough death to understand it in a way few children ever had to, said nothing except to ask him his name. Over the next five years, Braith clung to this man, Salvatore, as her new paternal substitute. To her, he was “Sal”. He wasn’t the warmest person, but for whatever reasons of his own, he took her in. She had no idea he was an Overmind, Her first few memories of him were of Sal bringing back food edible for a child, new clothes as she outgrew hers, even toys that she learned were actually weapons against the ugly things that lived in the world now. He even put up with her falling asleep on his lap, her occasional temper tantrums, and her refusal to believe her mother was probably dead. Growing up in a world of Lessers, Overminds and Reavers, exposure to Sal’s tough-guy attitude imbued the same in Braith. She picked up both his thick skin and his sarcasm. She didn’t cry when she lost her baby teeth, or when she suffered her first bite from a Lesser, though tears welled up in her eyes, much to her embarrassment. She was told no stories of tooth fairies or other delusional fluff. Instead, Sal gave her the cold, harsh truth of their situation, exposed incrementally as she aged. To teach her the dangers of going near a Lesser, he took her outside one day to where a fresh corpse had fallen. Keeping her a safe distance atop the roof of their current home, he tossed the corpse to a nearby Lesser and ran. A mesmerized Braith watched the Lesser tear into the dead human. Maybe she should have been afraid, but she was more paralyzed in shock. Still, she paid close attention as Sal told her how that could be her if she were careless. She then understood only too well that she could very easily die, and after seeing enough people being attacked by Lessers on their constant journey form one home to another, people who didn’t have an Overmind pushing the monsters away, Braith began to understand the dangers of her world. Her curious nature remained unimpeded. She could be extremely exhausting and irritating to deal with when she wanted to be, often putting them in unnecessary risk because she wanted to “see what was happening”. It wasn’t unusual for Sal to drag her away from danger by the scruff of her coat. When she was around seven, Sal gave her a BB gun, and helped her practice her aim. He also gave her a baseball bat once she had the strength to lift it. Armed with these, the rest of her life was rough, with her fair share of bruises from close encounters. When she reached eight, Sal gave her the knife her father had left behind. Braith promptly managed to nick her finger as she practiced unsheathing it. It was then that he sat her down to explain to her what he was. Somewhere along their journey together, Sal had turned Vampyre. She had wondered, in her quietly perceptive way, that he no longer managed Lessers as easily as he used to. Now it made sense. He couldn’t always stay with her. Often, he would tell her to stay put and go off hunting for food or supplies. At first, when she was younger, she would be terrified he was going to die like her father had. But he always came back and she stopped being so clingy and paranoid as she grew older. Over time, her childish innocence dwindled. She wizened up enough to realize her mother was probably dead. She also, erroneously, began to nurse the opinion that her father had died trying to bring her replenishment, and despite herself, she carried some guilt for that. Sal never corrected her ignorance. Slowly, Braith began to learn what it was Sal did. In short, he was a con, only instead of scamming for money, he did it for supplies. Whenever they reached any human or Vampyre communities, he would enlist her aid to help him. It was surprisingly easy to bait people when all they saw were her big blue eyes and heard her made-up sob stories. Once when she was eight, Braith snuck out of the house they were camped out in while Sal was away. She didn’t go far. She had only her knife and BB gun on her. She wanted to practice her aim and impress him when he returned. Unfortunately, all he found when he got back was Braith trapped atop the roof of a house down the block from theirs, with a small horde of Lessers pawing at her ankles as she fired rubber pellets down on them ineffectively. Frustrated, she yelled for him to help her. In his now-characteristic manner of teaching her a lesson, he let her stay up there for a good while before he attracted the horde away. She got an earful of talking to when they got home, but months later, she did it again. She wasn’t trying to be problematic. She just hated the idea of being treated like a useless baby incapable of pulling her weight. And so she would try and take down Lessers on her own, sometimes dropping bricks on them from the roof, sometimes drawing them close enough to throw empty glass bottles at them. One time, unknown to Sal, she filled a bottle with the oil he had stored for winter, and dropped it on a Lesser from the roof. The next thing she threw was a lit match. The results were impressive, but she didn’t dare tell Sal. Around her ninth birthday, shortly before they reached a place called Abital, Sal gave her a Glock 18 taken off a dead policeman. The automatic handgun was extremely light, could be easily switched between single-shot and automatic, and though the light weight made it difficult to control until she practiced with it, was easier for Braith to handle than other guns, as it didn’t slow her down. Braith was ecstatic. Sal was usually so careful with what he gave her, but she was mature enough or realize it wasn’t like her BB gun. It was only to be used for emergencies. When they reached Abital and settled into a room at the local inn, Sal went back to conning hapless people out of their gear. Braith loved to explore the town, though it was no place for a kid. A few times when Sal left her at the inn (with instructions to stay inside that she immediately dismissed), she would wander into the Arena to watch, dutifully paying her way in. Sometimes, she ended up mouthing off to the wrong person and received a slap that nearly dislocated her jaw. But she was a tough kid, and she bore the lesson. For a little bit. Sal took her to bars with him, usually to keep an eye on her, and it was there that she first tasted liquor, after much cajoling and yelling at the bartender till Sal gave in. She immediately hated it, but that wasn’t the point. Every adult around her was doing it. Sometimes Sal enlisted her help with all manner of things, from conning men to attracting women who couldn’t resist the “helpless child” act Braith put on so well. Braith didn’t mind. In fact, she learned to enjoy tricking people, though when Sal tended to use her without asking in advance, she would botch it up for both of them just to spite him. Despite this, whenever he threatened to leave her behind, she knew he wouldn’t. He’d had plenty of chances to. Once she thought one of Sal's clients was trying to swindle him, as opposed to the other way around. She thought the man was reaching for his gun, and so, displaying a slightly cold-blooded presence of mind, Braith reached out, grabbed Sal's beer bottle of the bar, and climbed up onto the bar counter and smashed it over the man's head. Sal immediately grabbed her, threw her over his shoulder, and exited. Sal and Braith are currently residing in Abital, though they sometimes stay in a hideout in Fort York when he has business there. Braith usually ends up wandering away when he isn’t looking. Category:Humans Category:Females Category:Active Category:Characters